Ideas to transform 21st-century work

Matthew Bishop talks to Hilary Cottam about her new book on ways we can work better

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For many people today, work simply isn’t working. The pay is too low, the hours too long or inflexible, while the work itself is not engaging and lacks meaning.

In The Work We Need, her new book published this week, economic thinker and social innovator Hilary Cottam sets out key principles for a revolution in how we work.

"People want to work. They want to work really hard, and they want to be at work, and then they want a different dimension," Cottam tells The Observer. "We've got aspirations to live well in all dimensions of our life, one of which is work."

For her new book, Cottam talked to thousands of workers across Britain and the US, from grave-diggers to Amazon delivery bikers, care workers to the chief executive of Microsoft, many of them in marginalised parts of the economy where scraping a living is particularly challenging.

She also led hundreds of what she calls “Imaginings”, where up to 24 people spend three hours discussing what they want from work, before collaborating in designing a new organisation or other solution that could help make work better.

"People sit in groups of four. I stick a recording device on each table, and I don't really intervene," she says. "People in the group challenge each other, the conversations emerge."

What she heard was that "everywhere I went, no matter the walk of life, whether it was in a London Goldman Sachs office, or with somebody who’s cleaning a local park, people had the same ideas again and again and again." Though, she adds, "if you are far from power in your work, perhaps your imagination runs a bit more, whereas if you're somebody that’s managing an HR department, it’s maybe harder for you to think outside the box".